Mortal Memory (10 page)

Having seen nothing that alarmed her, Miss Crawford turned from the window, took a couple of steps toward her small kitchen, then heard a shot. She returned to her window, glanced down, and noticed that the blinds in the Stringer's den had been lowered. She looked down at the small basement window just in time to see Tyrone and Jimmy Dale as they turned away from her, back toward the basement's interior darkness, as if in answer to someone's call. They lingered at the window for an instant, then shrank away from it. Seconds after the two boys had left the window, Miss Crawford heard three shots.

Rebecca paused a moment after she'd finished her narrative. She was watching me closely, no doubt because this particular crime resembled my father's a bit more closely than the first. It had been committed with a firearm, and three of the murders had taken place in a basement, which, on the surface, appeared to resemble the sort of place in which my mother, too, had died.

“Do you have any questions?” she asked tentatively as she returned the pictures to their envelope.

“No.”

Rebecca pulled out a third envelope.

“Herbert Malcolm Parks,” she said. “Age, forty-three.”

She said nothing else, now clearly preferring that I read the summaries she'd attached to the photos rather than listen to her own narration of the events.

The summary was neatly typed on plain white paper, and it was very succinct, giving the details briefly and without the slightest literary adornment.

Herbert Parks was a real estate agent in San Francisco. On June 12, 1964, he'd suddenly been stricken by an upset stomach while sitting at his downtown office. After complaining of the pain to several fellow agents, he'd driven to his home in Mill Valley, and there murdered his wife, Wenonah, age thirty-eight, and his two daughters, Frederica, twelve, and Constance, seven. Mrs. Parks had been shot once in the back of the head. The two girls had been forced to drink orange soda in which their father had dissolved several rat control pellets which contained cyanide. All three bodies had been stacked one on top of the other in the walk-in closet off the master bedroom.

The murders had occurred at approximately two-thirty in the afternoon, and as a result, there was no Miss Crawford to glance out her window and see something strange going on at the house next door.

Nonetheless, there were witnesses of a type. George McFadden, an electrical lineman perched high above the street only a few yards from the house, saw Parks's dark gray Mercedes pull into the driveway at approximately two that afternoon. According to McFadden, Parks had not gotten out of the car right away, but had remained behind the wheel, “as if waiting for some kind of signal” before entering the house.

A few minutes later, two young girls had come from the house, both of them moving toward the car. The smaller one, who must have been Constance, darted enthusiastically toward her father, while the larger one, Frederica, held back. Parks had already gotten out by the time they reached him, and, once again according to McFadden, he took each of them into his arms, hugged them for a long time, then, hand in hand, his shoulders slightly hunched, led them back into the house.

No one else saw or heard anything after that.

After reading the summation, I turned to the photographs. Arranged once again in the established order, the first picture showed Herbert Parks in a dark double-breasted suit. It was a professional photograph, done at a studio, and the smaller marks and blotches which must have been on his face had been air-brushed into oblivion. He had gray hair at the temples, but otherwise jet black, and for the purposes of the photo he appeared to have pulled a single curl down so that it dangled, slightly greased in fifties matinee-idol style, near the center of his forehead.

There were only two other photographs. The first, just under the studio picture of Herbert Parks, showed his wife posed beside the same dark Mercedes which George McFadden saw pull into the driveway on the afternoon of June 12, 1962. She was wearing a light blue blouse, its ends tied in a knot across her waist, a pair of jeans, rolled up to mid-calf, and white tennis shoes. She was holding a water hose and a red plastic pail, and seemed to be pretending to wash the car.

The last picture was from the family's personal Christmas card of the year before. Both Herbert and Wenonah Parks were in the photograph, but the focus of the picture, its heart and soul, was the two little girls they held in their arms. Constance was clearly laughing, but Frederica seemed to stare pensively toward the lens, her tiny mouth firmly set in place, not so much frowning, as refusing to smile, her eyes oddly vacant, her arms wrapped tightly around Wenonah's slender neck.

Rebecca noticed how my eyes lingered upon her, then spoke:

“He put her on top.”

“You mean, in the closet?”

“Yes. She was larger than Constance, but he stacked her on top, and folded her hands over her chest. The others were just sprawled across the closet floor.”

I remembered how my father had done something odd as well, how he'd washed my mother's body and arranged it carefully on the bed while leaving Laura and Jamie to lie in their ugly, smelly pools of coagulating blood. And as I remembered it, my eyes drifted back to Frederica, and suddenly I thought I knew why she had clung so desperately to her mother in the Christmas card photo, why she had, as George McFadden had mentioned, “held back” from running heedlessly to her father on the day he had assigned to kill her.

“It was because she knew,” I said, almost to myself, but loud enough for Rebecca to hear me.

She looked at me curiously. “Knew what?”

That it was coming,” I told her, “that her father was going to kill them.” I looked at her pointedly. There must always be someone who knows what's about to happen, don't you think? Not everyone can be entirely in the dark.”

“Why not?” Rebecca asked.

“Because so much is going on,” I said. “In the family, I mean. Surely someone has to sense it.”

Rebecca looked at me squarely. “Did you?” “No.”

“Did Laura or Jamie?”

It was odd to hear their names again, to hear them spoken of as if they once had actually existed, had lived and observed the life around them, rather than simply as the faceless victims of my father's crime.

I shook my head slowly. “I don't think so.”

“And your mother?”

It was strange, but at that moment, I suddenly suspected that somehow, through all the mists that must have clouded and thwarted and befuddled her, “poor Dottie” must have known that my father was approaching some dreadful line, and that if he crossed it, he might kill us all.

“She might have known,” I said quietly.

“What makes you think so?”

A memory invaded me, and I recalled how often she'd gone off to her bedroom, closed the door and remained there for hours, as if locking herself away from him, from us, from whatever it was she could feel heating the air inside the little mock Tudor house on McDonald Drive.

“She spent a lot of time in the bedroom,” I told Rebecca.

Even as I said it, I wondered what dreadful possibilities my mother might have envisioned while she lay alone on her bed. In her mind, had she ever seen him coming up the stairs, the shotgun in his hand? And if she had glimpsed such a thing, had she ever considered packing us into the car and taking us away before it was too late?

“But if she did suspect something,” I said, “she didn't do anything about it.”

Except to let us drift, I thought with a sudden bitterness, let us slide into destruction because she was unable to summon up even enough will to throw off her red housedress, gather us into the station wagon, and take us away from him.

As all of this swept over me, I found that I suddenly blamed my mother as much as, maybe even more than, I blamed my father. The cool rancor and cruelty of my next remark amazed me.

“My mother was very weak,” I said. “She was a nothing. She could have left him, but she didn't.”

“Had he ever been violent with her?” Rebecca asked.

“No.”

“With any of you?”

“No, never,” I said. “He would sometimes get irritated. Especially with Jamie. But he never raised his hand against any of us.”

To my surprise, Rebecca didn't ask any more questions. Instead, she simply handed me another envelope.

“This is the last one,” she said.

I took the envelope from her and read it quietly.

Hollis Donald Townsend. Age, forty-four.

On July 12, 1961, Hollis Townsend, a certified public accountant and avid foreign-stamp collector who lived and worked in Phoenix, Arizona, returned with his family from a two-week vacation at Yellowstone National Park. A neighbor, Sally Miller, who came out to welcome them back, placed the time at 3:35
P.M.
For the next few minutes, while Hollis Town-send unpacked the car, she spoke to his wife, Mary Townsend, thirty-seven. During this brief time, as she later told police, the Townsend children, Karen, five, and Sheila, eight, had played with the family dog, a large collie named Samson.

Nearly nine hours later, at around midnight, Mrs. Miller was awakened by a single shot, followed rapidly by two others. She rose, walked to her window, glanced out, and saw Hollis Townsend as he stepped out of the house, turned left, and headed for the garage. He had a large suitcase, one which appeared to be very heavy, since Townsend needed both hands to drag, rather than carry, it across the lawn. He was dressed in the same beige trousers and short-sleeved knit shirt he'd been wearing earlier in the day, an indication that he had not gone to bed, although, as Mrs. Miller told police, all the lights in the house had been off for more than two hours.

What had he done in that darkness?

Rebecca's summation gave a short but graphic answer. For one thing, he'd written several letters, all of which he'd eventually thrown into the kitchen wastebasket. The letters, written in Townsend's pinched script, alluded to an “inadequacy” which he had to face, the inadequacy, as he put it, “of life, of what I can't find in it somehow.”

At some other point during the night, Townsend had poured gasoline in every room in the house, drenching carpets and furniture, and leaving a trail which began in the kitchen, then led through the rooms on the ground floor before heading up the stairs to where his family lay sleeping obliviously. At the last moment, however, he had not lit a match, but had simply dragged his enormous suitcase out across the lawn, leaving the house intact behind him, the bodies of his wife and two children still lying in their own beds.

Each had been shot one time. Karen and Sheila had been shot in the back of the head, Mary through the forehead, presumably because, unlike her daughters, she slept on her back rather than her stomach.

Only two photographs were attached. The first showed Hollis Townsend beside the family swimming pool. He was wearing only a bathing suit, and he appeared to be beating his breasts comically, in a mocking imitation of Tarzan.

The second photograph was of Mary Townsend. She was kneeling down, her arms around her small daughters. It was a picture that had undoubtedly been taken during the family vacation at Yellowstone. Old Faithful, the park's most famous geyser, could be seen exploding from a cloud of steam behind them.

Without comment, I returned the summation and photographs to their envelope and handed it to Rebecca. She took them from my hand, placed them in her briefcase.

“I think that's enough for tonight,” she said abruptly.

I was surprised. “I have more time,” I told her.

She began to gather her things together. “I'd rather start fresh next time,” she said. The questions I want to ask you would take a long time to answer, and I'd rather not go into them now.” She closed the briefcase and started to rise.

I touched her hand. “Why my father?” I asked. “Why did you pick him?”

She drew her hand away from mine, leaned back slightly, and gave me her reasons so smoothly and matter-of-factly that she seemed to be quoting a long passage she'd written beforehand.

“Well, all the cases you've read about have a few things in common,” she said. “None of them had serious money problems. None of them had medical problems. None of them had lovers. There were no ‘other women' in their lives. All of them committed their murders in their family homes. All of them had planned the murders before-hand. Nothing about them was sudden or impulsive. These were not acts of rage. The killings were quick and clean.”

She paused, as if waiting for a question, then went on when I simply watched her silently.

“And last, these men all tried to escape,” she said. They didn't kill themselves, as some family murderers do. They tried to get away instead, to escape. None of them succeeded, except, of course, your father.”

As if in a sudden vision, I saw him. Through the rain, his hat pulled down, water dripping from its sagging brim, I saw my father move toward the family car, saw him as Mrs. Hamilton must have seen him, her eyes peering toward the street from behind the blue curtains that hung from her living room window.

“Yes, he did succeed in that,” I said. I smiled ironically. “He would be an old man now.”

Rebecca nodded, a small green leaf brushing against the side of her face.

“An old man,” I repeated, though without emphasis, a simple mathematical determination. The others swam into my mind, Fuller, Stringer, and the rest.

“What are you looking for in these men?” I asked.

The question appeared to sink into her face like a dye.

“I want to find out what it was in life that they couldn't bear,” she said.

“And because of that, killed their families?”

“Yes.”

I looked at her, puzzled. “And you think that in each of them it was the same thing?”

She peered closely into my eyes, as if trying to gauge what my response might be to her next remark. “The same thing,” she said finally, “in almost every man.”